I think you have it slightly backwards. While not entirely Google’s fault, search engines motivated much of this “noise” increase. It’s not as though there were

I think you have it slightly backwards. While not entirely Google’s fault, search engines motivated much of this “noise” increase. It’s not as though there were people who just made hand-curated, “high signal” websites and then all those people died. It’s even not that all those people switched to Wordpress or other CMS. It’s that the algorithms used by search engines directly incentivized a lot of the awful practices we now associate with the web. I think the first example of this, which is not nearly as apparent anymore, is it was more beneficial for a listicle to break up its elements into a separate page per element, requiring the user to click and reload an entire page to traverse the list, rather than just have the list on one page. This increased the number of back links if anyone wanted to link to multiple items on the list and allowed per-item SEO friendliness. Another more recent example is the infamous recipe blog. While some people genuinely like adding a backstory to their recipes, most add all of that fluff because Google penalizes short content (likely in an effort to reduce spam I would guess). This results in a weird lose-lose situation for everyone involved which has completely inundated the simple and extremely common search for a recipe. The only ones able to not do this are larger sites like Allrecipes which have enough reputation/clout in the eyes of search engines to avoid the spam classification.